Those of you who have frequented these parts for some time will know that Michael Weston King has been part of our americana community on this site right from the start (he played our very first festival in 2002 in Liverpool), and someone who we’ve covered extensively over the years. Tentative work began on the new album by his band My Darling Clementine in Spring 2024 with initial recordings taking place in Addaband studios in rural Mid Wales where Michael and wife Lou Dalgleish had relocated to in 2023 and where King had recorded his solo album “The Struggle” in 2022.
As is now well documented, Michael and Lou lost their granddaughter Bebe in the Southport attacks in July last year. As much as they tried to proceed, and despite their best efforts, making an MDC album, with something of such magnitude and sadness hanging over them, just didn’t seem the right thing. They qualified this when they wrote on their website earlier this year: “Our lives, our emotions, and consequently our musical activities have tended to ebb and flow in the aftershock of last summer. So, please bear with us as we continue to navigate our grief. What we can say is that music is, and always will be a great source of comfort, whether making and performing our own, or enjoying that of others. We will continue to share our new work as and when we can, and as and when we feel is right… For now, and certainly for the rest of 2025, we have decided there won’t be a new My Darling Clementine album. We simply cannot write beyond what we have been through so we have decided that these new songs are best served as solo recordings. Everyone’s grief is individual, even that of a husband and wife, and we need to channel that grief via our individual creativity, and in our own way, not in collaboration. This does mean however, that there will be 2 new albums instead of one.”
In the weeks after the Southport tragedy, Lou and Michael (who also lost his father the same week as Bebe was killed) both wrote a song each, mostly by way of catharsis, as a way of channelling their grief and which we ran here on AUK earlier this year. These songs would go on to feature in the MDC live shows from Autumn 2024 onwards but, without knowing, they also set the template for how they were to process their grief via their creative art as songwriters. i.e. individually, as opposed to collaboratively. Lou’s songs are now written and her album will be recorded before the end of year while Michael’s is now completed, and discussions are under way with various labels regarding release in early 2026.
Partly recorded in rural Wales and partly recorded in not so rural Sheffield, the new record is called “Nothing Can Hurt Me Anymore” and was produced by Michael along with Collin Elliot (Richard Hawley, Jarvis, Self Esteem), who also mixed the album. The musicians on the project include Dean Beresford (Hawley, Imelda May) on drums, Matt Holland (Van Morrison) on Trumpet, Shez Sheridan (Hawley, Dexys, Nancy Sinatra) on guitar, Clovis Phillips (Bill Callahan, Jerry DeCicca, Jeb Loy Nichols) on bass, keys & guitars, Clive Mellor (Liam Gallagher) on harmonica, and Erin Moran aka A Girl Called Eddy, and Jeb Loy Nichols on backing vocals.
According to Michael, it cannot be described as ‘country’, or indeed ‘Americana’, but is in essence an instinctive musical reaction to the events of last summer, influenced and affected by that unimaginable personal loss. As Michael says, “To be honest, it was almost impossible to write about anything else. I hope I am now creatively exhausted on the subject, but I think it affects my writing for ever, just as indeed, the loss of Bebe will”.
And soo we’re proud to be able to premiere the hugely moving first track from that album today ‘La Bamba In The Rain’ which feels particularly resonant given the hostile enviroment to immigrants (and let’s face it, anyone a little bit different) in the UK at the moment which Michael admirably has spoken out about in recent weeks, telling The Guardian last month: “This apparent kowtowing to the likes of Farage and Reform, who surely want such a policy in place, is extremely disappointing, though perhaps not surprising… I not only speak for myself but for all of the King family when I say that the ethnicity of any perpetrator, or indeed their immigration status, is completely irrelevant. Mental health issues, and the propensity to commit crime, happens in any ethnicity, nationality or race.”
‘La Bamba in the Rain’ deals with this head on, with its line: “There’s no hope for us this time, When every little thing is treated as a sin or crime, When the Union Jack’s unfurled, And placed around the waist of every teenage boy and girl“. And against the misplaced political alignments to come from such horror, there’s the devastating reflection: “But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Can’t put us back together again”.
